Design Breakdowns: Designer-Developer Gaps in Representing and Interpreting Interactive Systems

Nolwenn Maudet; Germán Leiva; Michel Beaudouin-Lafon; Wendy E. Mackay

Design Breakdowns: Designer-Developer Gaps in Representing and Interpreting Interactive Systems

Nolwenn Maudet ¹ Germán Leiva ¹ Michel Beaudouin-Lafon ¹ Wendy E. Mackay ¹

LRI - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique, Inria Saclay - Ile de France

Abstract : Professional interaction designers and software developers have different trainings and skills, yet they need to closely collaborate to create interactive systems. We conducted three studies to understand the mismatches between their processes, tools and representations. Based on 16 interviews, we found that current practices induce unnecessary rework and cause discrepancies between the original design and the implementation. We identified three key design breakdowns where designers omitted critical details, ignored the presence of edge cases or disregarded technical limitations. We next observed two face-to-face meetings between designers and developers. We found that early involvement of the developer helped to mitigate potential design breakdowns but new ones emerged as the project unfolded. Finally, we ran a participatory design session with two designer/developer pairs. Both pairs had difficulty representing and communicating pre-existing interactions. Creating complete interaction descriptions required iterating from individual examples to rule-based representations. We conclude with implications for designing collaborative tools that facilitate the designer's ability to express and the developer's ability to implement complex interactive systems.

Keywords : Designer-Developer Collaboration Design Breakdowns Shared Artifacts Collaborative Prototyping Tools

Document type :

Conference papers

Domain :

Computer Science [cs] / Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

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https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01614250
Contributor : Germán Leiva <>
Submitted on : Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - 3:59:34 PM
Last modification on : Monday, December 9, 2019 - 5:24:09 PM
Long-term archiving on: Thursday, January 11, 2018 - 1:59:42 PM

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